It’s one thing, in the service of promoting fossil fuels, to deny the reality of climate change, and insist that the plants and animals and people who are suffering are in fact doing just fine.
It’s another to acknowledge that climate change is causing animals to go extinct and just admit that you don’t care, because polluter profits are more important.
Time and again, the Trump administration is falling into the second camp, practicing not just denial, but denialism. The Trump team is embracing the catastrophe instead of hiding from it, and pursuing policies that will kill tens of thousands of Americans to protect coal and other fossil fuels.
The latest example is the decision to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. While initial coverage last week detailed the many negative repercussions of inviting plundering industry to a pristine wildlife refuge, Adam Aton at E&E noticed something rather incredible.
While you might expect the Trump administration to deny that this move would put wildlife at risk in order to justify the handout to the fossil fuel industry, the environmental impact statement actually did the opposite.
Per Aton, although the impact statement “downplays the effects of emissions, it does sometimes emphasize the ‘catastrophic’ impacts of climate change--as a way to frame the damage of drilling as minor and local compared with the broad upheaval wrought by rising temperatures.”
Yes, you read that right. To justify drilling for fossil fuels, the administration is saying that climate change is going to fuck everything up so bad that a few thousands miles of pipelines and fracking rigs won’t make a difference.
But even still, it admits that those changes “combined with development-related impacts… may result in extinction” of those vulnerable species. For example, of 157 bird species in the area, 69 will be put at risk because of the drilling.
So drilling in the Arctic might push 69 species into extinction. But hey, on the plus side, drilling in the wildlife refuge could produce between 1 and 10 billion barrels of oil. Oil that will cause more of the warming that’s driving these extinctions. Apparently, because the Interior Department figures that oil would just be drilled elsewhere, it doesn’t count its climate impacts.
But climate aside, just the physical disruption to the area will take literally hundreds of years to recover: 100 to 200 years for the wetlands, and up to 800 years for drier areas.
So we’re driving animals to extinction, polluting the homeland of indigenous people, warming the climate, and causing 800 years of a broken ecosystem, all for around a year’s worth of US oil consumption.
For the Trump administration, apparently this is a good deal.
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